Daemon

Intel seems to be pushing really hard for the SBC / IoT space, there are lots of these "let's take a Raspberry Pi (substitute your favorite SBC here) and replace the SoC / cpu with one made by Intel".
IMHO: nothing new, nothing to see, this will fail due to lack of community and momentum, like the others.
Move on.

Member

Well I tried to load up 11 RC3 on this up board... it hangs on boot with ppc0: to get around that you haft to escape to boot loader... esc key or #3 on keyboard...and type "unset hint.uart.1.at" to get the kernel to fully load... but no eMMC support so you can not see the on-board flash drive ( cannot load the OS onto the eMMC )...only see the usb drive. Since the usb 3.0 port is not a standard usb 3 port it is hard to get usb 3 speeds... so you are stuck at usb 2.0 speed... For all the people out their who want to try and load it up... I do not have time to get passed this point... others might...

Member

If anyone is interested OpenBSD 6.0 will see the onboard eMMC as sd0 and will install to sd0 for UpBoard....might help someone with FreeBSD the driver so FreeBSD can install on eMMC....same as OpenBSD will do...

Aspiring Daemon

They've since that time come out with another board (called UP Squared) - which uses Apollo Lake Pentium and up to 8GB. It seems to have more bells and whistles than the original UP board. Some guys at pfsense got it working as router (since it has the 2 Gigabit ports). I wonder about the extra peripherals though (bunch of them) - like GPIO, I2S, CSI, M.2, etc - and whether FreeBSD would support them, or (as in the case of M.2 - the peripherals that were attached).

Yeah - buy an Intel and right away patch it. I understand that! - The Jetway is AMD? Nah - that's Intel too. Anyway, the cost you've quoted is for the quad/8GB option. The duo/4GB option is around $169, and at that level it is right in line with some of the other board options I've been considering for a new router.

The downside is the Realtek NICS, but they were tested out to 900 Mbps on the pfsense install, and are not shared IIRC.

Son of Beastie

I see now the cheaper UP squared models. $145 for 2GB/32GB sounds reasonable for its size.
Why are they charging $30 dollars tax I wonder. I tried to get one with case for $179.99 and it tacked on $37 tax....

Aspiring Daemon

I see now the cheaper UP squared models. $145 for 2GB/32GB sounds reasonable for its size.
Why are they charging $30 dollars tax I wonder. I tried to get one with case for $179.99 and it tacked on $37 tax....

Aaeon (makes UP stuff) - has parent company of ASUS, so would have import toll. Yet - that does seem high.

I'm liking this board because I think it's a notch higher in terms of potential usage versus the PcEngines stuff. So, if I want to re-purpose the board from a router, it can work with a little higher performance demanding apps - like media, desktop, etc. I have plenty of the lower powered SBCs now, but they're good for fewer options. So long as the power consumption is less than something like 10W, I'm good.

Member

I had installed FreeBSD version 11.1 release amd64 with ZFS (Up-board has a 64Gb drive and 4Gb memory). It was installed fine and looks like works okay, but system regularly freeze and stuck and it happens unpredictable. Sometimes after 24h, sometimes after 7 days. After freeze the system stays as pingable, even nginx respond 504 error and even "top" shows a processes on remote console which was connected before. But when I stop a "top" then got a freeze as well and then console doesn't work at all. So the FBSD seems works unstable on Up-board unfortunately. And it seems that the system is losing the disk because I don't see any errors in the logs. Any ideas ?

Member

I'm using FreeBSD as home small server and desktop as well for some kind of development. Installed FreeBSD 11.1r on ZFS, XFCE 4.12, Chromium, Firefox, Opera and more. Tried a lot of combination of settings for ZFS and OS. It didn't help.

But found out some details during investigation. When I tried to reduce video memory in BIOS to low as possible (there is 3 options: DVMT pre-allocated, DVMT total GFX mem and Aperture size) then OS got freeze more often, every 2-3 hours. When reset setting to default then OS works more stable but still got freeze about every 3-7 days.

As fact a reason of freeze OS because loose a hard drive. My question is what the dependencies between video memory, and lost a disk and freeze of OS? Thoughts?

OS does not freeze completely on 100%. It is keeps as pingable and I can even enter login and password in the ssh. But cannot get in.

p.s. I also tried to catch the error from first tty by 'watch /dev/ttyv0' and got zero warning messages about any issues. Nothing.

p.p.s. Also I see a noise on the notifications from Chromium. Same time when I start a Chromium with option '--disable-gpu' browser works fine, no noises.

So, I guess a problem with video drivers or with on-board video adapter. But why OS got freeze because lost a drive a still mysterious for me.

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Son of Beastie

Have you considered trying UFS just to eliminate ZFS as a possible cause of the problem.
But looking at your top I would start by axing HAL in rc.conf.
This may be an xorg driver issue. Have you tried the newer kmod driver in FreeBSD for these newer Intel video chips.
From the console is the board solid?
I have never set the Aperture size for memory. Defaults are best here.

Aspiring Daemon

The other thing is possible memory exhaustion. This topic was written up in some threads on the forum a couple months ago. Just search for "swap" keyword. If your kernel has not completely bonked (evidenced by pinging, etc) - then it seems like your system has killed off some processes as result of memory exhaustion. System is still running, but crippled.

HAL configured correctly.
I'm gonna keep looking into and check stability for different BIOS settings. For up now I had disabled all BOOST options for CPU and GPU.
If it will not help then gonna try to install OS on external drive on ZFS. And then gonna play with UFS.
Assuming and considering all above, this is gonna take few more weeks. Will post the report after.

Member

Thank you for your reply. I read it from end to end and tried suggestions from that thread but it didn't help. Still got freezes. Next step to install FBSD on external usb ssd. The only way. Imho. Will let you know about results.

Member

Seems I found a problem. Overheating of eMMC drive... eMMC located on the reverse side of computer board and has a shared heat sink with RAM which is as fact, obviously, not enough. I had installed additional heatsink + fan and it definitely works much better and even faster then before (I see how applications works). Made the maximum load on the computer, cpu, drive, memory and video and worked perfectly for several hours without failures. So far so good. I couldn't imagine that the eMMC require additional cooling. I was sure it was designed for ambient temperatures and onboard heatsink should be enough. So this is was good experience. Hope it helps to someone.

Member

ronaldlees
Thank you. Right now it looks like this. Looks scary, but this is a temporary solution. Because another heatsink was not found. Works much stable now. Got one freeze but not because drive, but video memory. Chromium + youtube doesn't like low video memory. I changed video setting to default and 22 hours playing streaming video from youtube and so far so good.

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Daemon

Looks scary indeed!
At his point, it looks like the fan probably consumes more watts than the CPU.
Thanks maks for hanging in there so long, and sharing so much information. The value of this is priceless!